Pun And Pun Translation In English Advertisement From The Perspective Of Aesthetic Reception

Advertisement, as the ideal media for sales promotion, is filled with high artistry and aesthetic nature, whose language is abundant in novelty and beauty as well as humor. Advertisers usually adopt rhetorical devices to enhance the attraction of advertisements so as to leave the consumers profound impression. Pun, as one of the commonly-used rhetorical devices, takes advantage of homophonic or polysemous words and tries to produce ambiguity intentionally so as to achieve the effect of saying one thing and meaning another. Pun bears the characteristic of humor, brevity, which can effectively stimulate the readers’ purchasing desire while amusing them. And then the goal of increasing sales and gaining profit is attained. Hence, pun is always favored by advertisers.For English and Chinese pertain to different language systems and vast gaps exist in Chinese and Western culture, ceaseless debates have been aroused towards the translatability and untranslatability of pun in the translation field. Some scholars have made a lot of probes into pun and its translation from the aspect of sociosemetics, functional equivalence theory, pragmatics, etc., and also have achieved a great many of research results.This thesis makes a tentative study on pun and pun translation in English advertisement under the guidance of Reception Aesthetics. Reception Aesthetics breaks a path to walk close to the readers whose status are emphasized and promoted to a much higher level, which frees the study from text-centered paradigm and coincides with the objective of advertisement. In this regard, Reception Aesthetics breathes a new life in the study of pun translation and offers great guidance and strong applicability to it.In order to enhance pun’s translatability, this paper is based on Reception Aesthetics theory and its key concepts, including “indeterminacy of the text”, “the subjectivity of the reader”, “horizon of expectation and aesthetic distance” and under its guidance makes interpretation of pun translation in advertisements with ingenious examples. Base on the study, a conclusion can be drawn as follows: first of all, translators, as special readers, try to interpret the humor and indeterminacy of pun with their own horizon of expectations. And then a prior concern is given to target language(TL) readers, including their cultural cognition, linguistic habits, horizon of expectations and aesthetic experience, to whom a comfortable aesthetic distance is kept to increase the acceptance of the advertisement. Eventually, the translators attempt to retain or reconstruct the same rhetorical effect brought by pun in TL text. Additionally, translation strategy and some effective translation techniques on pun translation have been put forward: domestication translation strategy is mainly adopted to appeal to the consumers’ horizon of expectations and aesthetic experience so as to boost sales. Furthermore, it is hoped that this thesis offers some references and suggestions to the research of pun translation as well as its practical application and arouses much more attention to pun translation study under the guidance of Reception Aesthetics.